Sunday, 25 September 2005

For the past few months, there has been quite a bit of blogworthy action occurring. However, the indiscriminately public nature of the blog medium has prevented me from posting it, for fear that my current employers would stumble onto it.

A month or two ago I was contacted by a representative of Crytek, a computer games company located in Germany. This was in response to a job application I had optimistically submitted several months before that. It had taken them some time to get back to me; presumably they had tried someone else in the meantime. In the meantime, as described in previous posts, I had already taken a job.

The fact that I had only just started this job was unfortunate, but the opportunity to work overseas, and in a prestigious company such as Crytek, meant that I was determined to pursue this chance. The first step was a phone interview. This was conducted by a couple of fellows from the company, one of whom I could understand clearly and whose questions I could answer, and another whose questions were both incomprehensible and difficult to answer. However, despite this challenge the interview was well received, and I was contacted again - this time to travel to Germany for an on-site interview.

This presented a slight challenge. A flight to Germany takes about 24 hours from Melbourne. Overall this meant that I would be away for 5 days, of which 3 were working days. Ordinarily I could probably have organised leave from work, but we were right at the business end of the project, and being granted leave would be virtually impossible.

My only option was simply to claim sickness for the time I was away. The problem with this was that the company was likely to demand a medical certificate to prove my illness. However I resolved to cross that bridge when I got to it - after all, there was some chance that I would have been offered the job before the nastiness ensued.

So I jetted over to Coburg, Germany for the face-to-face interview (some low-quality photos of the town can be found here). This also went well, and after lunch I was offered the job. Therefore I am set to relocate to Germany! On returning, I immediately quit my job, giving myself 6 weeks until I relocate to prepare for the move and otherwise relax.